On Sun, Jan 06, 2019 at 12:03:03PM +0100, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> Sounds reasonable. However, Blender is a case where it might be worthwhile
> to keep a 2.79 around even after the final release of 2.8, because the
> graphics card requirements have been increased to  OpenGL core 3.3 *

I think this problem has finally been reported and fixed upstream:

Reports:

https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2019-February/049823.html
https://blenderartists.org/t/new-blender-install-gui-is-empty-no-icons-controls-etc/1145751

Fix commmit:

https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/commit/1db47a2ccd1e68994bf8140eba6cc2a26a2bc91f

I didn't test the fix but it's reported to work in that mailing list
discussion.

Blender 2.8 is working fine for my very limited use case, so I'm not
going to resurrect Blender 2.79 in Guix.

However, if somebody sends a patch that brings it back in a working
state, we can have both versions in Guix during the 2.79 -> 2.8 upstream
transition.